Savagely Beautiful: Alexander McQueen At The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibit Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which chronicles the late designer's short but spectacular design career before his tragic suicide on February 11th, 2010 - on the eve of his mother's funeral - opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4th, preceded by a gala opening, held the night before, on May 3rd. The show traces the designer's career from his noteworthy 1992 graduation collection from Central Saint Martin's in London, right through to his Spring/Summer 2010 Plato'sAtlantis collection - the last fully realised collection McQueen presented before his demise - and into the exquisite but unfinished Angels and Demons studio collection for Autumn/Winter 2010-2011 which Sarah Burton, who worked by McQueen's side for many years, completed and showed in Paris.

(The Plato'sAtlantis collection was “streamed live on Nick Knight’sSHOWstudio.comin an attempt to make fashion into an interactive dialogue between creator and consumer. In Plato’s Atlantis, the Sublime of nature was paralleled and supplanted by that of technology — the extreme space-time compressions produced by the Internet. It was a powerful evocation of the Sublime and its coincident expression of the Romantic and the postmodern. At the same time, it was a potent vision of the future of fashion that reflected McQueen’ssweeping imagination.”) (Quote: Bolton, A., metmuseum.org, 2011)

The gala opening of the new exhibition, hosted by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour along with actress Salma Hayek and her husband, owner of the McQueen brand, François-Henri Pinault, follows on the heels of another coup for the House of McQueen: Catherine Middleton's bridal gown, designed by Sarah Burton, currently at the helm as McQueen's creative director. “When I saw her sitting in the car, I knew it was McQueen and for the first half hour I couldn’t stop crying — it brought home how much I miss him,” said the late designer's sister, Janet McQueen. (Several members of McQueen's family were in attendance in New York for the opening of Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.) (Source & quote: Menkes, S., Alexander McQueen in All His Dark Glory, nytimes.com, May 2, 2011)

The "oyster" dress made of ivory silk organza, georgette & chiffon

(From the Spring/Summer 2003 Irere Collection)

Above left: overdress is cut from the panels of a 19th century Japanese screen. The under-dress is made of oyster shells

The exhibition, curated by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, begins with McQueen's forté and the foundation of his House: tailoring. The strength of McQueen's tailoring techniques, which underpinned and threaded their way through his entire career and which, by degrees, he improved and perfected through the years, was quite evident from his first creations from the designer’s 1992 graduation show at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. (That vanguard collection, inspired by Jack the Ripper, was bought, in its entirety, by the designer's muse, discoverer and friend, Isabella Blow, who, from the onset, intuitively recognized the rarity of McQueen's creative genius. Later, after Blow's own suicide in 2007, Isabella's extensive collection of McQueens was set to be auctioned off when Daphne Guinness intervened; she purchased the whole of Isabella's collection before it went under the auctioneer's gavel. On the night of the gala and as a live tribute to the designer, Ms. Guinness got dressed for the event in the store windows of Barneys New York: “I just did mynoh theater thing,” she was quoted as saying.) (Quote: Horyn, C., At The Met Costume Gala, McQueen Reigns, nytimes.com, May 3, 2011)

Two of the earliest designs on display in the exhibition, jackets, were cut and sewn by Alexander McQueen and are the rarest pieces in the collection. (Among the backdrops for the variously-themed rooms or galleries of the exhibition - The Romantic Mind, Romantic Gothic, Cabinet of Curiosities, Romantic Nationalism, Romantic Exoticism, Romantic Primitivism, and Romantic Naturalism - designed by the McQueen production team of Joseph Bennett and Sam Gainsbury, are aged and gray-speckled, smoked mirrors; library walls reminiscent of a grand old English country house; marquetry; rusty metal; a drawing created by McQueen that was blown-up and reproduced into wallpaper; and even a violently smashed wooden backdrop.)

But in an exhibition charged throughout with the spirit of McQueen, the probable centerpiece of the show is likely to be the Cabinet of Curiosities gallery, where wide boxed shelves contain menacing and exotic accessories, including those of Shaun Leane, the jewellery designer who collaborated closely with McQueen on some of the most unforgettable pieces of his collections; there are, as well, shoes and headdresses from past shows. Above the cabinet displays, videos from ten of McQueen's iconic runway presentations - which were often laden with elements of Victorian Gothicism and Byronism - run ceaselessly. (Sources: Menkes, S., Alexander McQueen in All His Dark Glory, nytimes.com, May 2, 2011; Horyn, C., At The Met Costume Gala, McQueen Reigns, nytimes.com, May 3, 2011)

Also included in the show is a miniature version of the infamous Kate Moss hologram, the hauntingly beautiful and ghostly finale - which had originally been set to the evocative strains ofJohn Williams's and Itzhak Perlman's theme song for the 1993 epic historical drama film, Schindler's List - from McQueen's Autumn/Winter 2006 Widows of Culloden collection in which the designer paid tribute to Moss in a show of support during a difficult time in her career when most other designers and sponsor companies bluntly rescinded their contracts in the face of a public drug scandal - in an industry renowned for the prevalence of its substance abuses; it was an attitude that McQueen always felt to be hypocritical.

As Sarah Mower described the show's finale in her 2006 editorial review for the fashion website style.com, “Only Alexander McQueen could provide the astonishing feat of techno-magic that ended his show. Inside an empty glass pyramid, a mysterious puff of white smoke appeared from nowhere and spun in midair, slowly resolving itself into the moving, twisting shape of a woman enveloped in the billowing folds of a white dress. It was Kate Moss, her blonde hair and pale arms trailing in a dream-like apparition of fragility and beauty that danced for a few seconds, then shrank and dematerialized into the ether. This vision was in fact a state-of-the-art hologram — a piece by the video maker Baillie Walsh, art-directed by McQueen.” (Quote: Mower, S., style.com, March 3, 2006)

Addendum: When the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition finally drew to a close on Sunday, August 7th, 2011, it set a new attendance record: 661,509 visitors came to view the show since its opening on May 4th, making it the eighth most attended exhibition on record at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surpassing the Met's 2008 show, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, which attracted 576,000 visitors.

(Source: Wilson, E., On The Runway, runway.blogs.nytimes.com, August 8, 2011)